In 1796, the London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun[1] observed that "[i]t rarely happens that thieves go upon the highway, or commit burglaries, until the money they have previously acquired is exhausted," and that "...without a safe and ready market he [the thief] is undone."
A systematic study of the various ways that stolen goods are stored, sold and bought – going beyond the previous focus upon the guilty mind and level of involvement of dealers and consumers – was conducted by Mike Sutton, who created a fivefold market typology based on his interviews with expert prolific thieves, inexperienced thieves, fences, drug dealers and stolen goods consumers.
In 1998, the UK Home Office published Sutton's report[6] proposing a systematic framework for researching and tackling local stolen goods markets.
Current development of the market reduction approach (MRA) has its origins in a 1995 British Journal of Criminology paper: Supply by Theft[7] that was followed by a 1998 United Kingdom Government Home Office research study entitled Handling Stolen Goods and Theft: A Market Reduction Approach,[8] both written by Mike Sutton[9] Further work on implementing and process evaluation of the MRA was conducted by Schneider.
[32] The New Zealand Ministry of Justice conducted a review of research focused on the MRA and identified eight areas of good practice in using it to tackle property crime.